Macau - note the Portuguese name and the Chinese one are not translations of each other. 

Καινούριους τόπους δεν θα βρεις, δεν θάβρεις άλλες θάλασσες.
Η πόλις θα σε ακολουθεί. Στους δρόμους θα γυρνάς
τους ίδιους. Και στες γειτονιές τες ίδιες θα γερνάς·
και μες στα ίδια σπίτια αυτά θ’ ασπρίζεις.
Πάντα στην πόλι αυτή θα φθάνεις. Για τα αλλού — μη ελπίζεις—
δεν έχει πλοίο για σε, δεν έχει οδό.
Έτσι που τη ζωή σου ρήμαξες εδώ
στην κώχη τούτη την μικρή, σ’ όλην την γη την χάλασες.



C.P. Cavafy





Fresh lands you shall not find, you shall not find other seas.
The city shall ever follow you.
In streets you shall wander that are the same streets and
grow old in quarters that are the same
and among these very same houses you shall turn grey.
You shall always be returning to the city.   Hope not;
there is no ship to take you to other lands, there is no road.
You have so spoiled your life here in this tiny corner
that you have ruined it in all the world.

Trans. George Valassopoulo


Source: http://www.cavafy.com/poems/content.asp?id=348&cat=1







A friend in Macau, Ana Maria Correia, has sent me these verses. I find them heavy-going. We could think they were written by a man who spent most of his entire life in Alexandria. He was therefore throughout his life a Greek in Egypt. I first read him in Brasil, in Edmund Keeley's and Philip Sherrard's translation, and then later I bought his work in the original at the Ικαρος publisher and bookshop in Athens.

Cafavy is a very complex poet. He was quintessentially Greek, but he was not Greek as, I assume, most Greeks in Greece. Namely, he was not exactly the offspring of a nation-state. He was intensely aware of history - Greek or rather Hellenic history - and in fact several of his poems contain precise dates, usually very ancient ones, say 'Demetrius Soter B.C. 162-150.' The verses above are from a poem, 'The City'. It seems to say that there is no point in moving. In a way, the poet is right.

Another friend, this time in Cape Town, wrote to me about a visit to the cemetery of his family, today abandoned and almost lost, in the middle of the woods somewhere in northeast Poland. It is a Mazurski-'German' cemetery. As the region became officially Polish - and Communist - after the Second World War, almost all of his relatives except one - a woman married to a Pole - left. His mother ended up in the Netherlands (almost at the other extreme of northern Europe therefore), and my friend eventually found himself in the Cape, South Africa - the southermost part of Africa and the Old World. He wrote to me after reading my posting on the Jews of Chennamangalam and Kerala, and my visit to one of their abandoned synagogues. Interestingly my friend in Macau also found herself in another part of southern Africa at an earlier point in her life, namely, in Luanda, Angola.

It is peculiarly touching to receive such messages in Melaka. It makes me realise I am still haunted by Brasil here. It is not saudades as such. Nostalgia is not enough to describe what I feel. It is more a feeling of being Brazilian - and being myself as a Brazilian - in Southeast Asia. Not wholly unlike being Greek in Alexandria, though a Greek in Alexandria is - or rather was, as Alexandria has become in the postcolonial era an Arab city only - a continuator of a very long, ancient tradition that was still going strong in Cafavy's time. There are the Portuguese here, my only link to an ancient tradition in this country, even though it is a tradition that has far shallower historical roots than Cafavy's Greek heritage in Alexandria. However, Greek Alexandria is as far as I know gone for good, whereas the Portuguese remain in Melaka, though nobody knows for how long, as they are a tiny community and Melaka is not kind to many of its young people, especially as it offers them no good job opportunities compared to Kuala Lumpur and Singapore.

Students performing a folk dance in Macau

My friend in Macau is living in a city that is sliding more and more into Mainland China, and is probably going to be entirely absorbed some time in the not too distant future (in case that is at all possible). My other friend lives in an African country (now, years later, he is in Poland). I wonder whether we all live, in our very different ways, and through our very different trajectories, under the same perspective as Cafavy, who wrote part of his poetry about men who liked men in Alexandria, and part about the Hellenistic world of ancient times (besides of course also writing on other themes, such as 'The City' above). Namely, we all live partly immersed in longing in surroundings that don't exactly easily lend themselves to it. In a way we all belong where we now are: a Dutchman of German-Mazurski ancestry in the Cape, a Portuguese in Macau, and a Brazilian of mostly Portuguese (but also Dutch and indigenous) origin in Melaka. Namely, our distant communal ancestors have had a long history of association with our current cities. Yet we also don't belong where we now are.

Nor do we exactly belong elsewhere either. As a matter of fact we have not been uprooted. We have simply moved - and stayed in the same place.

The New Macau Source: ബരഗുല്‍

Originally published on 04/03/2011